“Why does one sound all right and the other all wrong?” wondered Ginger.
She wondered about it often after this, and decided that the next time
They took up the Camden Road They’d better lose it, and put apple-trees
from Nowhere there instead.
But this is a digression.
“Just you leave the moon alone!” cried the wild little voice from the
Night Watchman’s box in the Square.
Everybody turned to look. What they saw was a small fierce figure in
an old top hat and a long-tailed coat dancing excitedly round and
round the roped-in enclosure. In one hand he had a telescope, and in
the other a pair of field-glasses, both of which he flourished in the
direction of the Balloon Woman.
“You would, would you?” he shrilled. “Come out o’ that, you Mrs.
Green.”
“Oh dear, oh dear,” said Ginger. “I’m afraid this is all my fault.” She
hurried to the enclosure. “Please do be quiet and tell me why you don’t
want me to have the moon.”
“The thoughtlessness of the young!” said the little man, mopping his
brow with a blue handkerchief dotted with white stars. “It’s all on
account of the likes o’ you that the likes o’ me has to watch the
night. A nice mess she’d get into otherwise.”
“I’m so sorry. Come and have a sausage,” coaxed Ginger.
He shook his head. “Can’t,” he said shortly. “What d’you suppose the
rope’s here for?”
“To keep us out,” suggested Ginger.
“To keep me in,” said the wild little man. “Set a thief to catch a
thief, and one that never knew his place to keep the night in hers. Ah,
many and many a time They’ve set me to watch her because They knew I’m
up to all her tricks. But They have to coop me in, or I’d be off. On
land They put a rope round me; on sea They put me up the mast.”
Ginger beckoned to the others, and they gathered round from the
Weatherhouse. Gypsy brought the teapot with him, and the Night Watchman
was given a cup across the barrier.
“What do you have to watch the night for?” asked Ginger, putting in
five lumps.
“Enough o’ your sugar,” said the little man. “That’s _her_ dodge, too,
sending out all her stars when a chap’s got to try to keep his senses
steady. Too much stars and sugar goes to the heart. What do I have to
watch her for, the jade? A pretty question! So as nothing gets stolen,
for one thing.”
Ginger put her face in her hands.
“You may well!” said the Night Watchman. “Many and many a moon has you
young folk tried to steal. Sometimes you’re too sharp even for me.
But the moon’s not the worst of it. It’s keeping the constellations in
order, especially in August when the shooting stars are about. It goes
to the heads of the old ones when those young ones gets frisking, and
it takes all my time to stop the Horse from kicking the Hunter in the
belt, or the Twins from parting company. ‘Move on there!’ I tell them,
till I’m hoarse. Comets are disorganizing too, in their way, but we’ve
generally time to prepare for them, like the Lord Mayor’s Show. And
then the fixed stars want watching; they’re liable to come un-fixed.”
“Why shouldn’t they?” demanded Gypsy. “About time they did.”
“Futurist!” said the Night Watchman. “But of course it isn’t only the
stars. There’s plenty else to watch the night for.”
“What?” asked Gypsy.
“Ghosts,” said the Night Watchman. “And fairies.” He checked himself,
and handed back his cup abruptly. “There’s all the sounds, too, that
can’t be heard by day--such as the dust settling, and the pavement
cracking, and the tide turning in the Thames. Ah, the pavement takes
a lot of watching, and _still_ you can’t help the cracks coming.
Sometimes one big square will split into half-a-dozen little ones
before you can say Knife!”
“Would that stop it?” asked Ginger.
“It would stop anything if you said it quick enough,” said the Night
Watchman, “but you never do. You may try again and again, and in the
end be no better off than the fools who try to say Jack Robinson. And
again, the night must be watched for the thoughts that won’t come out
in the light. Some of them are too shy. But the boldness of them after
dark! They take a lot of managing, for they’re a disorderly crew, bad
_or_ good. Then on land you watch the night for its moths and bats,
and on sea for its wrecks and its sails. But perhaps the best thing to
watch the night for, on sea or land, is morning.”
“Why?” said Gypsy.
“Because then They come and take the rope away,” said the Night
Watchman.
Then he went into his box and sat on his stool and put his telescope to
his eye and glared at the Pole Star. If the Pole Star had had any idea
of side-slipping it abandoned it instantly, and kept as steady as the
Rock of Gibraltar.
“Who do you think he is?” asked Ginger.
“Nobody knows,” said the P.A.
“I expect he’s Mr. Maeterlinck,” said Gypsy, “or Mr. Devant. But I
don’t care who he is, darling, and one of these days I’ll steal the
moon for you under his very nose. Meanwhile have half my balloons.”
He gave her the bluest balloon, and she hung it over her door of the
Weatherhouse, and he hung the other over his. And Jeremy and the rest
went back home, if they had one, and hung up theirs over their beds, if
they had any.
But nearly all the balloons had disappeared by the morning.
[Illustration: GYPSY AND GINGER’S FRIENDS
8: THE GROUNDSEL MAN]
Gypsy and Ginger first saw the Groundsel Man in the early morning. It
was very early morning indeed. The moon had just gone out, and a good
deal of Mother-o’-pearl was left in the sky, and there was a faint
glow over Fleet Street. Of course Gypsy and Ginger couldn’t see Fleet
Street, but they looked that way for the glow. The streets were quite
empty when the Groundsel Man came along, and for this reason alone
you couldn’t have helped noticing him. But you would have noticed him
even in a crowd. His basket was slung in front of him by a strap over
his shoulders, and he limped a little, but his limp, instead of being
a drag, only seemed to make his step livelier, so that he came down
the pavement on the light jerky hop of a chaffinch hopping down a
potato-row after the digger in hope of worms.
“He’s just like the little rabbits Jeremy sells,” said Ginger.
“If you could look under his trousers,” said Gypsy, “you’d find that
instead of feet he has two spiral springs.”
“It’s quite easy to look under his trousers,” said Ginger, “and he
prefers not to wear socks.”
“Another Simple Lifer,” said Gypsy. Most of their friends were.
“But he _has_ got a pretty hat,” said Ginger. “I wish I’d got one like
it.”
His hat was the chief reason why you’d have to notice the Groundsel Man
in a crowd. It was a straw hat of all sorts of shapes and colours, with
no top to the crown and whiskers round the brim. And it was weighed
down by a glorious wreath of buttercups. The Groundsel Man’s basket was
also half buttercups, as well as groundsel and chickweed, and in one
hand he had a short thick thorn-stick, as black and shiny as an old
clay pipe, and in the other he carried a great branch of white wild
roses like a banner. As he stepped by he said,
“Good morning, sir and ma’am. A fine night it’s been and a finer day
_’twill_ be.”
“Are _you_ telling _us_ that?” said Gypsy doubtfully.
“I am, sir. You’re clever little people,” said the Groundsel Man
cheerily, “but it’s not the likes o’ me you can tell about the weather.
My kind needs no weatherhouses.”
“Not even in London?” said Ginger, bringing the teapot.
“I don’t live in Lunnon, ma’am. I only passes through. Lunnon’s a cage,
she is. But her’ll never ketch _me_.”
“Where do you live?” asked Ginger, filling a cup for him; and Gypsy
offered him his tobacco pouch.
“Thank you, ma’am. Thank you, sir. I lives anywheres that a bird may,
ma’am, and after all that’s anywheres there is. In sedges and tree-tops
and the flat tops of hills and hedgerows and the faces of clifts.”
“And the sky?” asked Ginger so eagerly that Gypsy surreptitiously tied
a string round her ankle to haul her in by if she flew up too suddenly.
“As oft as not,” said the Groundsel Man sipping his cup and crumbling
his bread. More than half the crumbs fell to the ground, and he let
them lie.
“Why do you come to London at all?” asked Gypsy.
“To open the bird-cages, sir.”
“What sport,” said Gypsy. “Do you ever get caught?”
“Very seldom, sir. I does it after dark. I takes note of my street by
day, and by night I sets it free. Sometimes the cage is hung outside
the house, and then it’s easy. But other times it stands inside the
window, and then I has to force the catch. I’m doing Lunnon street by
street. When her’s empty I’ll do Manchester. But so fast as I empty
her, her fills up like Philemon’s pitcher.”
“What sort of birds do you let out?” asked Ginger.
“Every sort, ma’am. Canaries and parrots and redpoles and
skylarks--yes, ma’am, I’ve known houses as even keeps skylarks in
cages. Once I found a Red Cardinal in Bethnal Green. I hopes he flew
back to South Ameriky, but if not there’s warm spots in Hampshire.”
“You’ll have a grand time,” said Gypsy, passing him the matches, “the
night you do the Zoo.”
The Groundsel Man puffed hard, and disappeared entirely behind a cloud
of smoke; out of which he piped shrilly, “Flamingoes!” The cry was like
a thin streak of lightning passing through a thunder-cloud.
Ginger asked, “What happens when you _do_ get caught?”
“I sells them a bunch of groundsel for their dickies,” he said. “Oh,
that’s all right, ma’am. The birds doesn’t suffer, neither way. And so
soon as the basket’s empty, back I goes to fill it up.”
“Back where?” asked Ginger.
“Anywheres,” he said vaguely.
“Do you sell buttercups too?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. Buttercups is my pleasure. Well, so is the groundsel too,
mine and the birds’. But this sort of gold can’t be sold for pence to
the keepers of cages. They’ll sometimes cage robins, ma’am, robins
that’ll come into your house for company like your brother. But what
sort of company is one in a cage? Will they play pretty like the Robin
of Cold-harbour?”
“Who’s he?” asked Gypsy.
“A little chap I knows. He goes to church on week-days. First time I
seed him he was sitting in the pulpit singing fit to bust, so sweet as
any parson.”
Gypsy said doubtfully, “Do parsons?”
“Don’t they, sir? I supposed they did, else why do the folk go? But
I never heard one myself. It’s mostly some other bird I’m listening
to o’ Sundays, the daws at their games round the chalk-pits, or the
plovers swooping on the Downs, or the larks you can’t see for the air
in between. But when my Robin’s done his Glory-Glory, down he hops
to a pewback, and so hops all down the aisle like a stone on a pond,
skipping one pew at each hop. And when he gets to the end he thinks,
What can I do next? and he looks at the stained glass windows and Pooh!
cries he. And he chooses a clear pane of glass under a Saint, and flies
up and sits against it with the sun on his breast as red as a ruby. And
there he sings Glory-Glory all over again, and out he flies. Would you
cage that bird, ma’am?”
“I wouldn’t cage anything!” said Ginger angrily, “and I’m going to
Manchester by the next train.”
Gypsy took another reef in his string.
“Well, it’s time somebody did,” said Ginger.
“Don’t you fret, ma’am,” said the Groundsel Man. “I’ll get there all in
good season. Would you like some buttercups?”
“Yes, please,” said Ginger, running for a bowl, which she filled at the
fountain.
The Groundsel Man put his buttercups into it carefully, and then with
a sort of hop and flutter he was up on the roof of the weatherhouse,
perched for a moment on the chimney, where he stuck his branch of
wild-rose. The glow from Fleet Street was now so strong that the small
white burnet blossoms looked like puffs of golden smoke. Then he gave
another flutter and disappeared.
Ginger ran round the corner to catch him, but when she got there she
could see nothing but the sparrows quarrelling round the Nelson Column,
and the pigeons flying from the spire of St. Martin’s to the Dome of
the National Gallery.
[Illustration: GYPSY AND GINGER TAKE THINGS SERIOUSLY]
It was after the visit of the Groundsel Man that Gypsy realised that
life is not all play.
“The time has come,” said Gypsy, with his mouth full of tacks----
He was trying the effect of sausages in festoons round the walls
of the Weatherhouse. Something had to be done with the sausages,
which accumulated daily in increasing quantities as Gypsy and Ginger
accumulated friends. There was no cupboard-room in the Weatherhouse,
and Gypsy agreed with William Morris that the Useful is not
incompatible with the Decorative.
“The time has come, Ginger,” said Gypsy, “for us to take things
seriously.”
“I know it,” said Ginger, picking up an odd length of sausages and
beginning to skip to the old tune of
“Andy Spandy,
Sugardy Candy,
French
Almond
Rock!
Breadandbutterforyoursupper’sallyourMother’s
GOT!”
“It’s all very well,” said Gypsy, between hammer-strokes, “for us to
be light-hearted in our own lives, and even in the comparatively grave
matter of earning our living; but as well as that we must remember that
the world is full crying of evils----”
“You can’t really skip with sausages,” said Ginger, giving it up.
“Just hand that length over, if you’ve quite done with it,” said Gypsy.
“The West Frieze wants completing.”
“I’ll dust them off a bit first,” said Ginger. “What do the evils cry
for?”
“Reform,” said Gypsy.
“Then let’s reform them,” said Ginger. “But we needn’t cry along with
them, need we?”
“That,” said Gypsy, “would merely be piling Peleus on Ossian.” (I
think I mentioned that he had got his education in Cambridge; but his
classics were good enough for Ginger, who had never got her education
anywhere.) “No,” he said, festooning the final sausage, “it’s no use
crying over spilt evils. It’s better to mop them up laughing. How do
you like that, darling?”
“The _line_ is beautiful,” said Ginger, putting her head on one side
and shutting her eye on the other. “But the colour-scheme is pasty.”
“It improves in the frying-pan,” said Gypsy. “But enough of Aesthetics.
Let us return to Sociology. What evil are _you_ going to reform?”
“Twenty seconds,” pleaded Ginger.
He took out his watch.
“Time!” called Gypsy, as Ginger called, “Got mine!”
“Got mine too!” said Gypsy. “What’s yours?”
“Croquet!” cried Ginger.
“Bamboo furniture!” cried Gypsy.
“Why do you want to reform croquet? I rather like croquet, and I play
it rather well.”
“The better the worse!” said Ginger fiercely.
“You feel this subject passionately,” said Gypsy thoughtfully.
“Yes, I do.”
“Perhaps you play it badly?”
“That’s got nothing to do with it,” said Ginger quickly. Then she
contradicted herself still more quickly. “Yes, it has, though. However
you play croquet has to do with it. The only thing is not to play it at
all. Croquet is the root of all the ill-temper there is. If you could
once kill the spirit of croquet throughout the world, there’d be no
more wars.”
“How will you start?” asked Gypsy.
“With a forceps,” said Ginger promptly. “The strongest forceps owned by
the most famous dentist in New York, because American dentists are the
best. Then I shall go all over the world in the middle of the night,
pulling up all the hoops on all the croquet-lawns I can find.”
“Like so many double-teeth,” said Gypsy.
“And I hope they’ll hurt,” said Ginger vindictively.
“I’m sorry you feel it so bitterly,” said Gypsy, “but I suppose things
have to be felt like that before they can be reformed.”
“Don’t _you_ feel bamboo like that?”
Gypsy shuddered. “I had an aunt in Wisbech once,” he said. “She died of
a tea-heart.”
“I’m sorry,” said Ginger gently.
“Oh, it didn’t matter,” said Gypsy. “After all she had to die of
something, and it’s much better to die of what you like than of what
you don’t. Men and women die of tobacco and tea with enthusiasm, where
they would only resent death from German Measles or Mexican Gulps.”
“Do people die of Mexican Gulps?” asked Ginger.
“They would if they got it,” said Gypsy, “but they don’t.”
“It sounds like geography,” said Ginger, “and I very nearly died of
that when I was a child. So I was inoculated against it, and I don’t
even know where Wisbech is.”
“It’s not important,” said Gypsy. “But if you live in Wisbech, and
buy enough tea at a certain shop, you can in time furnish your house
from attic to basement with gratis bamboo. Why, you couldn’t buy two
ounces without a bamboo bonus in the shape of a walking-stick or a
curtain-pole; and for a whole pound, of course, you got hatstands
and overmantels. After a while there were bamboo hatstands on every
landing, and bamboo overmantels under as well as over all the
mantelpieces. We were presently obliged to take all our meals at
separate little bamboo tables, like the best boarding-houses and the
worst tea-shops. Of course, the little tables wore out very quickly,
quite often giving way in the joints in the middle of meals, but more
and more came along, and we never succeeded in living them down. We
sat on bamboo stools while we ate, and there were bamboo waste paper
baskets and bookcases, and a bamboo side-board, and I _think_ a
bamboo piano. I know there were bamboo beds. Mine broke down every
other night, but my aunt was such a confirmed tea-drinker that a new
one always appeared next day.” Here Gypsy suddenly stood on his head,
kicking his feet in the air, and letting out prolonged wails like a
dog made miserable by the moon. Then he got down and sat up again, and
Ginger who, as he spoke, had turned paler and paler, held his hands
very tight, and they remained silent until they both felt better.
Then Gypsy groaned, “Yet cities could be such beautiful places.”
“Yes,” sighed Ginger, “if it weren’t for the people in the red brick
houses having all the almond trees. People who live in the grey stone
houses ought to have them. But the first almond trees in London
_always_ bloom against red brick.”
“I know,” growled Gypsy, growing wild-eyed again. “And then, the
corrugated iron! Oh, _galvanize_ the man who first thought of
corrugating iron.”
“There’s a worse evil than corrugated iron,” whispered Ginger. “There
are wired flowers. Wired flowers are as dreadful as caged birds. We
won’t interfere with the Groundsel Man’s job, but oh, Gypsy! to-night
I’m going out to un-wire all the flowers in Piccadilly!” Her eyes shone
like the Gemini as she said it.
“Brave child!” said Gypsy. “But before you go, put the flat-irons on
the brazier, please.”
“What for?” said Ginger.
“Because,” said Gypsy, “_I_ shall go out and uncorrugate the iron.”
[Illustration: GYPSY AND GINGER GET TO WORK]
You may remember the Season, not so very long ago, when Londoners used
to wake up every morning wondering Well Really What Next. A good many
surprising and beautiful things happened during those brief weeks, and
they were all due to the nocturnal efforts of Gypsy, Ginger, and their
friends.
At first Ginger stuck to her pet reform of Unwiring Flowers, and Gypsy
to his of Uncorrugating Iron. Not a night passed without some suburb
having all its roses unmuzzled. Not a night passed without the roof of
some Army Hut or Tennis-Club Pavilion being straightened out by Gypsy’s
flat-iron. The process, of course, exactly doubled the length of the
roof, so that yards used to jut out at either end. The Tennis-Players
were considerably annoyed; and in the Army, Fatigue Duty resolved
itself into sitting on the roof with a pair of curling-tongs, and
crinkling the roofs back to their normal proportions. The soldiers who
had been hair-dressers were the best at it, and some really beautiful
work in Marcel Waving was put in by the experts for the Y.M.C.A. The
Army minded it less than the Sportsmen, for they might just as well
corrugate the iron on the roof as pick up the Woodbine stumps on the
floor. But Gypsy was practically the death of local sport that summer,
all the club-time being occupied in doing up what he had undone
overnight. He gave some trouble, too, to Noncomformists and Sheltered
Cabmen.
But Gypsy didn’t really want to stop sport. He liked sport. He himself
could put such a twist on a serve that it would come back and hit his
partner of its own accord; and in the cricket-field he never hit
anything under Boundaries and Catches at Cover. His Innings consisted
of exactly one of each. At the beginning of his Club Season the Scorer
always made out his analysis in advance to save trouble:
Average
GYPSY 4
it would run. If everyone had played Gypsy’s sort of cricket there
would have been no need to talk of brightening the game. His cricket
was as bright and as brief as a lucifer. It favoured the two-hour
match. So he was really sorry to make the Houndsditch Hatters’ Second
Eleven spend all their practice time in crinkling the pavilion roof.
Also it vexed him to work on the system of Penelope’s Web. Presently he
took to clipping the ends off the roofs after they were straightened.
This checkmated the Cricketers and Tennis-Players, because when they
attempted to re-corrugate the roof there wasn’t enough of it left over
to keep out the weather. So they had to send for some more.
During the days of waiting Gypsy turned the time to account, and ironed
out all the Cabmen’s Shelters on the No. 11 Bus route. But somebody
else was now beginning to make good use of his efforts. An Unknown
Quantity was also mysteriously at work under the moon.
One night, as Ginger was going home bent nearly double under a great
load of rusty wires after a busy hour among the lilies of Sloane
Square, she met Gypsy, flat-iron in hand, staring at one of his
flattened rooms like a man in a trance.
“What are you looking at?” asked Ginger.
“That!” said Gypsy, pointing upward.
She shifted her faggot and gazed at the roof, which bore this legend in
luminous white paint:
THERE IS NO TRUTH IN THE RUMOUR THAT
THIS UGLY IF UTILITARIAN ROOF IS TO
BE REPLACED WITH A BEAUTIFUL THATCH
“Why did you do that?” asked Ginger.
“I didn’t,” said Gypsy.
“Who did, then?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Gypsy.
It was only the beginning. Soon his other roofs began to be adorned
with similar statements. A shelter in Kensington inquired:
WHO HAS BEEN CIRCULATING THE FICTION
THAT OLD WEATHER-STAINED TILES ARE
THE LATEST FASHION FOR CABMEN?
THEY ARE NOT!
And a Canteen in Putney asserted:
THE REPORT IS ABSOLUTELY UNFOUNDED
THAT BEFORE LONG THIS UNPREPOSSESSING
HUT WILL RESEMBLE THE LOG-CABINS OF
THE EARLY SETTLERS
These suggestions, and others equally attractive, were gradually being
negatived on iron roofs in every quarter of London.
If Gypsy and Ginger were mysteries to the Cricket-Clubs and
Flower-sellers, the unknown Luminous Painter was a mystery to them. But
at last they discovered him.
They had taken half an hour off one night to look at the pattern of
the moon on the river, and they found him standing in the middle
of Westminster Bridge. He was very tall and lean, and wore a tight
frock-coat that was quite a good green. It had once been rather a poor
black. His soft felt hat was also green, and even he did not know what
its first colour was. When they caught sight of him he was engaged in
removing the hat from his head with an exquisite gesture, and bowing
right and left with an unexampled grace. But for themselves there
was nobody else on the bridge, yet he performed his courtly salute
again and again, north and south, east and west. His deportment was
as expressive as it was beautiful; it expressed deference without
humility, airiness without impudence, and it paid a compliment not only
to the recipient, but to the executor, of the bow.
“What _are_ you doing?” cried Ginger, advancing with an involuntary
curtsey.
The individual almost swept the ground with his hat.
“Madam,” he said, sweetly, “I am Bowing to the Circumstances.”
“What Circumstances?” inquired Ginger.
“My own Circumstances, madam. They require it of me frequently.
They require it, alas! of many people. But it is one of the Lost
Accomplishments of the age. One of the many. These things were once
done with a grace----!”
He dusted and replaced his hat. “They stand saluted!” he said.
“I don’t believe that Circumstances which require bowing to _ought_ to
be saluted,” objected Ginger. “Why do you bow to them?”
“In acknowledgment, dear madam,” said the shabby gentleman, “that I am
not what I was.”
“What were you?” asked Ginger.
“A Professor, madam.”
“And what are you?” asked Gypsy.
“At the moment, sir, I am Contradictor of Rumours.”
“You contradict them on my roofs!” cried Gypsy.
“I have that honour, sir,” said the ex-Professor.